Timeline 10/27/62 Series

Timeline 10/27/62 is about a world in which the swinging sixties did not happen!

Why Timeline 10/27/62?  Because that date is a very significant date in my life and in the lives of everybody else in the world alive today because on Saturday 27th October 1962 World War III almost started.  World War III probably wouldn’t have lasted very long because one side would have been swiftly obliterated in the first 24 hours of a cataclysm that would have left vast tracts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabited and uninhabitable for decades to come.  Perhaps, a quarter of the world’s population would have died in the firestorm or in the starvation and the plagues that would have ensued in the following weeks and months.

In the real world a Soviet submarine captain was talked out of firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at a US destroyer; and twenty-four hours later both the US and the Soviet Union had stepped back from the brink.  But in the Timeline 10/27/62 world that torpedo explodes under the keel of the USS Beale and everything changes…

There is no certainty, no one profound insight into what ‘might have happened’ had the Cold War turned Hot in the fall of 1962.  One imagines this scenario has been the object of countless staff college war games in America and elsewhere in the intervening half a century; one suspects that few of those war games would have played out the way the participants expected, and that no two games would have resolved themselves in exactly the same way as any other.  That is the beauty and the fascination of historical counterfactuals, or as those of us who make no pretence at being emeritus professors of history say, alternative history.

The seventh and eighth books in the main series:  A Line in the Sand  (published in June 2016) and The Mountains of the Moon (which will be released on 27th October 1016) respectively sub-titled The Gulf War of 1964 – Parts I & II, will be followed by two more ‘Main’ Series instalments in 2017.

Book 9:  All Along the Watchtower will come out in the first half of 2017; and Book 10:  Crow on the Cradle will be released – all being well – on 27th October 2017 at the same time The American Dream (the fifth book in the USA Series) is made available.

Books in the Timeline 10/27/62 series: